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It’s a small world!

Years ago…. as in like 11-12 years ago, I was quite addicted to IRC (chat rooms)… and a friend of mine was on an alt.tv.buffy newsgroup which had a chatroom, so she dragged me in, so I could chat to people there. I loved the people there and would chat away all night with them. I even (ashamedly) made a website to showcase our hilarious chat conversations and profile each chatter. *ahem* (thank you geocities for your demise that took all those embarrassing websites with it)

We had a couple of real-life meetups and stuff, and one was where I met hubby. He had never come onto the chat room, nor had posted in the newsgroup, but he’d seen the meetup and decided to come along. I think it was going to see the first X-men movie 🙂 I thought he was hot, he was trying to chat up someone else 😉 but I found an excuse to e-mail him (to send him a link to my photos from a previous meetup), and I managed to snare him with my incredible wit 😀

(I started my e-mail with a polite “I hope you don’t mind me e-mailing you”, to which he replied saying it was fine and something about him having no reason to not want me to e-mail him… to which I replied “Ohh, then I guess you didn’t get the Melissa virus I sent, ohh better luck next time”… he laughed and our e-mail chattering started and we got together :D)

Anyway… it was a great group, but slowly we all seemed to dwindle away. I don’t really keep in touch with anyone from there much, except I have a couple of people on my Facebook friends list (not that we really interact much)… and the friend who originally introduced me to them… and hubby of course…

So 11 years or so on…. I’m playing Tf2 with my new friends (all of whom I met just from playing that game), the subject of Facebook comes up, I (kinda) feign disappointment that one of the women there wasn’t my FB friend, so another friend sends me the link to her page. I click the button to send a friend request and notice the “mutual friends” list… There’s 3 people on there. OMG, she knows 3 of the people I used to chat to in IRC…. how weird is that…. then I take another look at her name….. hmm… vaguely familiar….. I sneak a peek at one of her photos – OMG the guy in the background is definitely from those IRC days, and she does look familiar, I know who she is…. I can’t believe it!

So I manage to squeak out a “hey, we have some of the same FB friends” – so she asks who, and I tell her, and she does an OMG 😀

So yes… we knew eachother way back in the IRC days! She was in the other newsgroup group of people (for x-files fans), but we used to mingle in the chat room and sometimes at gatherings also.And somehow we both managed to join the same TF2 gaming group!

She asked me if I knew someone else from that IRC group, and if I’d been to her wedding, and I laughed – as I was one of the celebrants (and that was actually where I proposed to hubby – we snuck out of the reception for a walk, stopping by the tree next to where the ceremony was, and that’s where I proposed).

— Almost as trippy as the night I was out to dinner with my inlaws (and extended inlaws)…. one of whom had brought along another couple and their young child. Us younger generation (hubby, his sister, brother & his wife.. and our kids) were all sitting up one end of the table, and the oldies at the other, with this couple (who was our age) …. So we hadn’t spoken to them, but their child was sitting down with us. Later in the evening, the guy came over to say hello, and introduced himself, with a really unusual surname, and asked jokingly if we could spell it. The only time I’d ever heard it before was a guy I knew at school. So I looked at him again…. and the similarities were striking. So I mentioned that I didn’t know if I could spell it, but I used to go to school with someone who had that name. He’s asked which school, I’ve told him and yes – it was him!

So amazingly, he’s very close with my hubby’s cousin (as in basically an adopted member of the family). And since he’d just moved to QLD, and that’s where we were (helping my SIL move house), he got invited out to dinner with us all.

Embarrassingly I did have to mention that he once held the back of my skirt up with a ruler in Computer class Bwahahaha (in one of those times your mouth starts talking before your brain has a chance to say “hang on, may not be appropriate an anecdote here”)… which embarrassed him more than it embarrassed me (since his wife was there – though she assured us he hadn’t changed LOL!)